The Truth of the Matter (34 page)

But Agnes wasn’t ready yet to go home, and she and Lily talked it over. “If you don’t mind being in charge of the little girls,” Agnes said, “I’ll stay on for a little while longer and then travel on the same train with Bobbin and the cats. I’ll get Sam to tell me who to get in touch with. . . . I don’t know what it is,” she said, “but I really would like to stay on a little longer, if you don’t mind.” Lily had no objection at all; in fact, she was gratified. She had hoped Agnes would enjoy getting away, and when Sam heard about it, he thought it was a good idea.

“Agnes, your house is the headquarters for making the sesquicentennial queen’s float. It’s pretty much a madhouse,” he said. “I’m staying on a few days, too, at the Ocean House in Port Clyde.”

“Why?” Lily asked. “Why wouldn’t you just stay on here? . . . Oh, Sam! For goodness sake! I don’t think you have to worry about proprieties!” And Agnes was startled by the idea that Sam even considered observing such formal decorum when it hadn’t even crossed her mind; she thought of Sam Holloway as family. On Saturday morning Lily and the girls, with Sam escorting them, were off to Boston. It was the first time Agnes had been in the big house all by herself, and she trailed through the rooms absorbing the atmosphere.

At Scofields she had been unable to stop dwelling on the ways in which she had disappointed her children, especially in light, just recently, of poor Betts. No letters for anyone had come from Betts or Will, who were on their honeymoon, after all, and Agnes chose to see that as a good sign. If Betts wasn’t writing
anyone
. . . If Will hadn’t been in touch with Sam . . . And, too, Agnes discovered that she was suddenly feeling grieved—almost bitter—at the ways in which her children had disappointed her: that she knew they struggled between irritable dislike and great fondness toward her, the fact that she had glimpses of the possibility that one or another of them wasn’t happy in his or her job or marriage or circumstances.

It seemed to Agnes very cruel that her own children wouldn’t spare her the pain of that knowledge, when they also wouldn’t ever act on her advice. On the other hand, she often suspected that they kept most of what they felt secret from her. How could all this time of her life have passed and still she hadn’t straightened out or pinned down the way to spend whatever was left? When she was younger, she would never have guessed a fifty-year-old woman could be so at sea.

Agnes had never admitted to anyone the thing she deemed the greatest failure of her life. She had realized that there had only been a little time—perhaps nine years per child, seventeen years altogether—when she had thought she was essential to the lives of the children who grew up in her house. Seventeen years should be enough, she thought. Seventeen years is great good luck. But somehow or other, as she had been forced to reevaluate her own life in light of her grown children’s presence, she had come to understand quite clearly that there were so many ways she had failed them as far as playing any sort of heroic role in their lives.

It might be that you could only occupy a hero’s role if you died as early in your children’s lives as Warren had. And, certainly, he was the hero of their lives. She had never revealed to anyone, though, how profoundly she had failed Warren, or how he had failed her. Even given the black moods he endured, he wouldn’t have died if not for her terrible judgment. Well, her pettiness. But, in Warren’s case, Agnes couldn’t forgive him or herself for an act so entirely removed from her idea of heroism. The whole thing, however, was so fraught with self-pity, melodrama, and humiliating pathos, that, for the most part, she put it out of her head and plodded on as best she could.

The third day she spent in Maine without the distraction of Lily or the girls or even a book, Sam returned from somewhere or other late in the afternoon, and the two of them settled in the same spot Agnes and Lily had staked out on the rocks. And gradually she realized that she was, in fact, telling the whole dreary tale to Sam Holloway. It surprised her even as she found herself talking about Warren, but she didn’t worry about Sam’s judgment of her or of Warren; she felt no need to protect anyone from Sam’s consideration, because he seemed able to accommodate and be interested in villains and heroes alike, as well as everyone in between. She told him that she was certain Warren had committed suicide, and for a moment Sam looked across the pink-flecked rock on which they sat, and then he shook his head.

“Oh, I don’t think so. I doubt that,” he said, but not argumentively, just as a matter of fact.

“I’m certain of it, Sam. I’ve seen it over and over again in my head, just exactly like it happened. You see, Uncle Leo hadn’t gotten over Audra’s death. He was as blue as I’d ever known him to be. And Warren was in terrible shape. But I had all the children. . . . I was so tired. I should never have let them go. But sometimes . . . sometimes Warren was just mean. I always knew when he got like that it was his own demons. . . . Well, I’m not sure I did know that then, in fact. I would remind myself. But I’m not sure I knew it when he would say something hurtful,” she mused.

“I did know he would apologize. And, oh, I got so tired of that. The morning before he left for Arbor City, I just didn’t want to hear it anymore. He tried to say he was sorry. He said he was just worthless. That he knew that. But it was too easy for him to say he was worthless! Warren could be really unkind, but he wasn’t ever worthless. I was sick and tired of hearing him say it. I was sick of letting him off the hook! Because he would just . . . Well. I told him that morning that there were some things you can’t apologize for. Some things can’t be taken back. Oh, Sam, I was so mad at him.”

Sam didn’t say anything; he just nodded, and his expression was impassive.

“Do you know what I said to him? Oh, Lord. I don’t think I’d ever lost my temper that way before. Not at Warren, anyway. But I said we should just figure it out finally. Sit down and decide what he did mean when he said the things he said to me. I told him that I could see him starting to say the same sorts of things to Claytor—never to Dwight, though. Probably because nothing Dwight did could be accounted for by Warren’s own nature. Oh, I don’t know.” She shook her head and paused for a moment.

“He agreed, though,” she said finally. “He said he wanted to do that. That he thought he was going to have to get over even touching any alcohol. That he didn’t want to turn out like his own father. But, you know what? I got so furious at him! I challenged him. I said, ‘Well, I can’t stay here if we don’t sit down and settle this right now. I’ll be gone if you leave this house before we work this out. I’ll take the children to my father’s house. We’ll live in Washington.’ But Warren said he had to go to Pennsylvania that day. That he couldn’t put the trip off. He was the one trying to be the peacemaker. Not in that . . . oh, that pleading sort of way. But I had surprised myself, you see. I couldn’t get over how good it felt to be mad at him. To say what I thought—to say more than I thought!”

She was silent for a few minutes, as though she were deciding something, and Sam didn’t make any comment, only a sort of murmur of attention.

“I said to Warren, ‘I’m so mad at you I could spit! Go on your trip! Just go! I don’t care if you drive off a cliff!’ That’s what I said, Sam, and I don’t know how I can stand it. I was so much in love with him.” She put her chin down on her crossed arms, still peering out at the waves rolling in, crashing and breaking upwards in plumes of spray. “And I loved him, too. How could I have said such a thing? It wasn’t just romance, or some silly sort of thing. . . . I mean, I was his wife and I loved him.”

Sam just sat alongside her for a little while, thinking over what she had told him. “But Agnes, that’s not the way a person’s thinking before he kills himself. I don’t think a state of mind like that could have come over him so fast. I don’t think a man who is about to try to put things straight is going to kill himself on his way to Pennsylvania! But also, Agnes, everything I’ve ever heard about Warren Scofield has made me like him. Even though I can see now that he was just a human being. But I’ve never heard anything that would let me believe that Warren would do something that might put his uncle in danger. I don’t think, either, that Warren would have made that choice for Leo Scofield. Just from what Lily and Robert say . . . Claytor and Dwight, too.

“It always sounds to me like Warren should have been Leo’s son instead of John Scofield’s. It always sounds to me that John Scofield worked hard to be the black sheep. But the idea that Warren drove off that road on purpose . . . I have to say it seems unlikely to me. It seems impossible, frankly. Warren wasn’t a fool. A car wreck isn’t a very smart way to kill yourself. You could just as well end up paralyzed.” Sam had thought it over carefully all the while Agnes had been speaking; he wasn’t trying to make her feel better or to persuade her that it couldn’t be her fault Warren was dead; he was merely laying out for her what he thought was the most logical conclusion.

They sat on without speaking for a while, although Sam didn’t take note of the pause; he was one of those rare people who felt no need to fill any silence that might fall during a conversation. Eventually Agnes turned her head his way and smiled at him. “Oh, Sam,” she said, “I hope you’re right.”

For a little while they remained exactly as they were, but then Sam had to go meet a fellow who was interested in supplying granite for Cardinal Homes. Within no more than five days, Sam already had a network of good friends and many acquaintances in Port Clyde and Tenants Harbor.

Agnes stayed just where she was, gazing out at Matinicus and Brothers Island. She thought Brothers Island looked like the most desolate spot on earth, with only two spindly trees at one end and one stark house at the other. When she had first visited Maine with Warren, though, just after they were married, she hadn’t noticed anything at all about the place, really. She had once said to him that she didn’t like scenery. He had laughed. “That’s pretty sweeping,” he had said. “There must be some scenery someplace in the world that you’d like.”

“Oh, well,” she had said, “I don’t mean that it’s any particular place that I do or don’t like,” she explained. “I’ve just always thought there was nothing more boring than having to admire scenery. Those long drives . . . And what can you say after a while about whatever it is? No matter how pretty it is, there’s not that much to say about a nice view.” She had only been interested in Warren, then, and in what Warren thought about her.

This evening as she sat on the rocks in Martinsville, Maine, however, at this moment in her life, Agnes found she had no desire to go inside, just now, as she studied the end of the day. She didn’t look at the scenery, really: the lighthouse seeming toylike at the end of Mosquito Point, or the several islands scattered in the distance, the lobstermen puttering close to shore in a cloud of gulls, and one lone sailboat farther out, moving needle-like through the water, as opposed to the chunky, bouncing working motor boats. Agnes sat out on the rocks and merely inhabited her surroundings. She existed in the moment and at that particular place without self-consciousness, and without the sticky dailiness of the constant comparison of one thing with another. Winter or summer, morning versus evening, the shroud of fog or the alarming clarity of illumination, sunshine as opposed to rain. She had no need to form an opinion of the weather; all sorts of it would come and go.

She did understand that somehow or other she had fallen into a momentary state of grace; she suddenly found herself in an exquisite circumstance she had never yearned for or even imagined. She didn’t take into particular account the tide coming in with unusual, rolling intensity, the curling bands of water pale green but harboring darker flecks of tiny fish or other debris, and crashing in enormous plumes of spray against the rocks. Just in the past few moments, she had reached a point where she no longer categorized and catalogued each individual element as she watched the evening close in. She simply basked in a state of inhabiting a landscape that was all of a piece and in which she was no more than part of the whole. This unexpected solace delighted her, and yet she hadn’t known until now that it was a circumstance waiting to be happened upon—that out of the blue she might come across a smooth, clear, gleaming state of discrete serenity. She hadn’t guessed sooner that there were lovely and sometimes astonishing aspects of existence that would continue to clarify themselves to her only as she passed year after year through the relatively small drama of living out the length of her own life.

In February of 1930, Warren Scofield and his uncle Leo were on their way to Arbor City, Pennsylvania, to continue working out the details of the merger of Scofields & Company with Arthur Fitch and Sons. Warren was rounding an icy descending curve in the mountains of western Pennsylvania when a sudden burly flutter caught his eye, and, although he veered away from it, the thing seemed to rise toward the car. Warren instinctively turned the steering wheel hard to the left in order to avoid it. For a brief moment the creature was familiar, but Warren didn’t live long enough to name it. The big car gathered momentum on the black ice and slid across the opposite lane and over the white furze of grass until coming to rest when the edge of the right bumper slammed into a lone maple tree. Not long after the big black Packard came to rest and the resonance of its crash no longer vibrated through the air, although its motor still hummed, the big turkey hen led her chicks across the road, her feathers still ruffled aggressively, and the birds disappeared into the scrub as it thickened farther down the hill.

R
OBB
F
ORMAN
D
EW
is the author of the novels
Dale Loves Sophie to Death,
for which she received the National Book Award;
The Time of Her Life; Fortunate Lives;
and, most recently,
The Evidence Against Her;
as well as a memoir,
The Family Heart
. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, who is a professor of history at Williams College and the author of several books on Southern history.